Unforgettable

A new thriller from an unheralded master of suspense.

In the long, groping, and haphazard drama of evolution, human consciousness is a recent and precarious acquisition. Our anxiety at its precariousness has much to do with our increasing life expectancy: living longer physically, what can we expect to experience mentally? Neurological impairment is something we’re all too likely to know firsthand, and Peter Abrahams’s suspense novel “Oblivion” (William Morrow; $24.95) makes of this condition something rich and strange: an investigation into “lost time, like some dark forest in a fairy tale.” The protagonist is a forty-two-year-old Los Angeles private detective named Nick Petrov, who, at first unknowingly, suffers from a form of brain cancer (“glioblastoma multiform”) whose symptoms he attempts to rationalize or conflate with the progress of his current investigation. Unlike the morbidly compelling case studies of Oliver Sacks’s “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1970), which are narrated from outside the afflicted individuals, “Oblivion” immerses us in Petrov’s assailed consciousness as he navigates his way through a Dali landscape of baffling clues, memory lapses, and visual hallucinations in an attempted reconstruction of personality that is simultaneously a search for a missing fifteen-year-old girl: “Find the girl and live.”

It is a turn of the screw that Petrov, the Russian-born son of a former K.G.B. agent turned C.I.A. contractor, is a celebrated private investigator known for his success in finding missing people, and a further turn of the screw that, in his search for the girl, the clues Petrov begins to discover in his own possession overlap ominously with a seemingly solved case of his from twelve years earlier: “What happens if when all your energy is focused on a shaky future, the past suddenly gets shaky, too?” The vividly delineated physical terror of Petrov’s predicament is compounded by the psychological terror of his loss of self in a recurring phrase wielded by Abrahams to chilling effect: “His mind was changing him.”

“Oblivion” is composed in spare yet often poetic prose. More sympathetic in its portraitures than its satiric predecessors “Their Wildest Dreams” (2003) and “The Tutor” (2002), it’s an artful variant of the familiar nightmare—familiar, indeed, as a fairy tale—of the amnesiac waking to a jigsaw-puzzle world to be reassembled by heroic effort. In its L.A.-noir atmosphere, as in its knottily woven plot, it may remind readers of Christopher Nolan’s ingeniously contrived mystery film “Memento” (2000), whose initial violent scene is in fact its climax, from which, in reverse chronology, enigmatic vignettes follow as a man afflicted with anterograde amnesia tries to discover who has killed his wife. “Oblivion” similarly begins with a scene out of chronological order, in which Petrov commits perjury while testifying in a trial, though we don’t understand this crucial fact until a hundred pages later, when, seeing himself on videotape, in the way of a man observing a stranger, Petrov understands it. The investigator may even be guilty of having murdered a former, blackmailing mistress, and of having disguised the killing as the last in a series committed by a madman ironically named Reasoner, whom Petrov was pursuing at the time: “Suppose there was a serial killer on the loose and you wanted to kill somebody. All you’d have to do is find out the details of the serial killings and do yours the very same way. Who would ever suspect?” Only another investigator, as it turns out.

Petrov is a riskily impaired hero for a work of genre fiction, a private “eye” whose vision is occluded. Before a cerebral hemorrhage wipes away much of his memory, he seems to have been a kind of machine of ratiocination. Following the example of his spymaster father, he takes all notes in code. He’s a taxonomist of human emotion who has sketched and labelled ninety-three facial expressions: anxiety is sixty-one, contempt forty-one, dread sixty-eight, confusion twenty-seven, disgust fifty-three, and fear one. Petrov has been celebrated in a made-for-TV dramatization of his most famous case, “The Reasoner Case,” with Armand Assante (playing Petrov), Kim Delaney (“a year or two before she hit it big”) as a female investigator who was Petrov’s lover, and an apparently miscast Dennis Franz as the sadist killer. In an act of desperate self-scrutiny, Petrov studies this film as if it were not a TV exploitation of the case but a documentary to be decoded.

Although Abrahams’s novels are genre-affiliated, they differ considerably from one another in tone, texture, ambition, and accomplishment. Often the prose is coolly deployed as a camera, gliding over the surfaces of things, pausing to expose vanity, foolishness, pathos. (In the dark suburban comedy of manners “The Tutor,” an affluent family invites a virtual demon into the household in a frantic effort to raise the son’s S.A.T. scores, with disastrous results for nearly everybody.) Unlike most suspense fiction, which operates on the practical principle that swift, cinematic scenes will keep readers turning pages without lingering to wonder about verisimilitude, originality, or, indeed, literary worth, Abrahams’s novels are gratifyingly attentive to psychological detail, richly atmospheric, layered in ambiguity.

Abrahams’s ambitious début novel, “The Fury of Rachel Monette” (1980), is a curious amalgam of the literary novel and the thriller, its intricate plot linking the present-day kidnapping of an American child and the murder of his college-professor father to Nazis during the Second World War, covert Israeli politics, and contemporary anti-Semitism. Both “The Tutor” and “A Perfect Crime” (1998) contain high-I.Q. psychopaths who imagine themselves to be writers creating narratives of destruction, and who become infuriated when the world fails to conform to their fantasies. “Characters again acting on their own,” the tutor Julian thinks, “leading to plot complications without end.” “A Perfect Crime” alludes elliptically to Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” the villainous cuckold Roger Chillingworth replicated by a yet more villainous cuckold named Roger Cullingwood, who plots to murder his adulterous wife. In “Lights Out” (1994), a young convict named Eddie falls, oddly, under the spell of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; released from prison, and involved again in a life of violent crime, Eddie yet seeks out the meaning of Coleridge’s poem as if it were a riddle relating to his life. When a bookish young man tells him, “The albatross is just a device, the MacGuffin,” the literal-minded Eddie doesn’t get it.

Yet Peter Abrahams’s strongest novels seem to suggest, despite their allegiance to genre, a fascination with something beyond mere form. “I don’t like loose ends,” the damaged hero of “Oblivion” says. The novel climaxes with a ritual confrontation, in this case in an underground passageway, between the hero and his nemesis, who has been stalking him in plain sight throughout. To some readers, the ending will seem overly tidy; to others, admirers of mystery and suspense novels, it has the feel of the inevitable. As in the Shakespearean sonnet, the fixed-rhyme couplet marks the ending.

Fixed forms, however, can yield infinite, ingenious variations. If all art is about degrees of woundedness, genre fiction is most clearly the art of the compensatory. In his epigraph to “Oblivion,” Abrahams quotes this striking passage from “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”: “It must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess—that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity.” ♦